[MaxBarraclough]

> Talking technical stuff to non technical is an enormous pain. The levels of dumbing down is near endless.

It's rare that a non-technical person expect that they will be able to understand lots of technical details after one conversation. More likely, they aren't especially interested in technical details.

They likely want to talk at a high-level about requirements and development schedules. If a software developer is unable to communicate effectively with people who aren't software developers, that's a skill they should work on.

Lawyers, accountants, architects, and doctors, for instance, are expected to be able to speak with people from outside their profession. (I see wfme already mentioned doctors.)

> Not everyone has to be able to explain their product to the masses

That strikes me as unambitious. If software developers have earned a reputation for being unable to communicate effectively, that's unfortunate. The answer isn't to invent a whole new profession to fill the gap.

The only line of work I can think of that outsources communication with 'the masses' is science. I suppose there's an analogy between scientist/science communicator and engineer/marketer, but I imagine science communicators tend to be more technically literate.

[Jensson]

> Lawyers, accountants, architects, and doctors, for instance, are expected to be able to speak with people from outside their profession. (I see wfme already mentioned doctors.)

Those are frontline positions working directly with laymen though. So while doctors needs to be able to talk to laymen, the chemists working in medicine factories don't. The problem here is that we have the same title for frontline and backline developers, frontline developers are doctors, they know a bit about chemistry and can prescribe and implement treatments. However there is no reason for a developer optimizing database engine queries to be able to communicate their work to laymen, as the entirety of their work are technical details no layman would care about, they are akin to the chemists working in medicine plants.

People will continue to talk past each other as long as we have the same word for those two jobs. Developers who double as product managers and work directly with clients says that technical skills hardly matters and you should be a product manager first and foremost, which is fine but they shouldn't tell pure developers that it is wrong to focus on the technical part since they don't do the same job.

[unfocussed_mike]

> So while doctors needs to be able to talk to laymen, the chemists working in medicine factories don't.

But they for sure need to talk to lawyers, accountants and doctors occasionally. All of those (especially the doctors /s) are laymen when it comes to chemistry.

[Jensson]

You have frontline and backline chemists as well. Some chemists needs to be able to talk to less technical jobs, but other chemists specializes on improving the process or other technical skills.

So it isn't laymen/specialists, you have many many layers with people dumbing it down a bit in every step. Telling the specialists at the bottom of those layers that they need to be able to talk to the top of the layers is just nonsense. You need to be able to talk to people who are less technical than you, and to people who are more technical than you, so the layer above and below you, but that is it. It can help to be able to bridge more layers, but it isn't that important.

The problem with programming is that almost all those layers have the same name: software engineer.